Darbone was born in 1913 in Evangeline, Louisiana. His father worked in the Louisiana-Texas oilfields and the family moved frequently. When Darbone was 12, his mother gave him his first fiddle. "She called it a violin," he remembers. "That's for reading sheet music; when you play by ear, it's called a fiddle." With no teachers available, he taught himself via correspondence course.

As a teenager, Darbone began playing house dances in Orangefield, Texas. He focused on the country style known as hillbilly string-band music and the newly emerging, jazz-influenced sound of western swing. In 1931, the family moved to the remote oil-field town of Hackberry, deep in the salt marshes of southwestern Louisiana. There, Darbone met a neighborhood guitarist named Edwin Duhon. The two began playing together, and soon, with a second guitarist, they were performing at parties, combining country music sung in English with Cajun material sung in French. In 1933, Darbone named the group The Hackberry Ramblers.

From 1946 to 1956, the Ramblers played every weekend at a roadhouse called the Silver Star. Darbone, who also worked by day as a bookkeeper, built himself a new brick home, and jokes that "each brick represents a song that we played at the Silver Star."

Besides playing music, Darbone is actively involved in the Knights of Columbus, attending regular meetings and supervising a weekly bingo game. He is an early riser, getting up every morning at 4 a.m., riding four miles on his Exercycle and then attending mass.

Duhon was born in 1910 in Youngsville, Louisiana. Like many Cajuns and Creoles of his day, Duhon was raised in an exclusively French-speaking household. When he first attended school he was forbidden to speak French and spanked for doing so. While Duhon learned to navigate the English-speaking world of "les Americains," he never abandoned his native culture.

As a teenager, Duhon began playing both the accordion and guitar. Moving to Hackberry, Louisiana in 1931, he struck up a friendship with Luderin Darbone. The two began practicing in the Duhon home, he recounts, until "my daddy ran us out of there, we sounded so goddamn bad!" Duhon and Darbone founded The Hackberry Ramblers, but soon Duhon took the first of many trips to work overseas as an oilfield hand and electrical engineer. "I worked in Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Jamaica, you name it," he recalls. "I put up the first traffic light they ever had in Lake Charles."

When Duhon would return to Louisiana, he'd find that someone else had taken his place as a member of The Hackberry Ramblers. Undaunted, Duhon would simply learn a new instrument, eventually mastering piano, accordion, bass, drums, guitar, and harmonica. Meanwhile, Duhon raised 11 children while working as an electrician. He is the proud recipient of a Sixty Year Membership Pin from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and also served as the Chief of Police of Westlake, Louisiana. "I even gave my wife a ticket," he recalls, "and she wouldn't feed me for three weeks!"

Croker was born in 1934 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. As a teenager, he began playing steel guitar with a country band known as Eddie Shuler and the Reveliers. On the way home from engagements with the Reveliers, the young Croker would stop by the Silver Star to hear The Hackberry Ramblers. "And it's a funny thing about that," he recalls; "I can remember saying to myself: 'Self, one day you'll be playing with that band!' And thus it came to pass."

A veteran of the Korean War, Croker joined The Hackberry Ramblers in 1959. He worked by day at the Conoco Oil Refinery and later as a salesman of trenching equipment—he is an expert in the field of trenching safety. By night, he also played with country singer Allane Yokum and led a band called the Southern Sounds. Croker recorded with the Ramblers in 1963 and has appeared on all of the band's recording sessions and tours that have followed. He also serves the band's principal singer and emcee; as the latter, he has an ample repertoire of bandstand jokes and one-liners.

Croker is an avid fisherman, a rabid sports fan and a devoted grandfather. "I really am a nice guy, once you get to know me," he explains with typical dry wit, "but that getting-to-know-me part is rough."

Faulk was born in Cameron, Louisiana in 1926. "I heard The Hackberry Ramblers when I was a little boy," he recalls. "I was too young to go inside the dance halls, so I listened through the window. But I didn't have much time for music in those days; we had to work and put food on the table. We'd raise hogs and chickens. We hunted ducks. We'd run seines and trot-lines for fish, we'd set crawfish traps and hunt alligators."

Living off the land, Faulk also learned to cook what he caught. He's an accomplished Cajun chef who has prepared his zesty dishes—gumbo, jambalaya, shrimp Creole—on national TV. Faulk has a zesty performance personality too, with a steady stream of hearty whoops and hollers that further enliven the Ramblers' already ebullient music.

Faulk served in the Navy during World War II, and was often asked to be a translator, bridging the gap between contemporary French and his native Cajun dialect. After the war, Faulk worked in the Gulf Coast oilfields and joined his first band, The Bluefield Ploughboys, while living in Florida. Returning to Louisiana, Faulk played religious music with The Gospel Strings before joining The Hackberry Ramblers in the early 1980s. By day he worked as an ambulance driver and maintenance man at Moss Regional Hospital in Lake Charles.

Faulk holds the undisputed record for the most relatives in attendance at a Ramblers performance: 18 members of his family came with him to the Grand Ole Opry. Fun as that was, though, Faulk's philosophy remains "the best is yet to come!"

Sandmel, the Ramblers’ drummer and producer, was born in Nashville in 1952. Raised in Cincinnati, he began drumming as a sixth grader, inspired by The Beatles’ debut performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. His first kit consisted of a toy snare drum with a metal cage for his pet mice serving as the ride cymbal. In the seventh grade Sandmel graduated to a full drum set and formed a band called The Cadavers, soon renamed The Henchmen. The Henchmen played surf music, the British invasion repertoire and songs by local rock-guitar hero Lonnie Mack. Years later, Sandmel found that these rhythms had much in common with the Cajun two-steps of the Ramblers.

In college, Sandmel played washboard in a jug band called The New Shreveport Homewreckers. After working as a deckhand on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in his early twenties, he moved to Chicago in 1976, where he started writing about music for publications such as Down Beat and The Reader and playing drums on the city’s blues circuit, working with blues artists Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Johnson and Junior Wells.

Sandmel moved to New Orleans in 1982. He continued to write about music and began playing with The Hackberry Ramblers in 1987, after sitting in with them in Baton Rouge. He is currently working on a book about New Orleans R&B singer Ernie K-Doe. As a change of pace from music and journalism, he goes whitewater canoeing whenever possible.